Federal departments will now have to publicly identify and internally flag all retired public servants collecting pensions who land contracts worth more than $10,000.

Treasury Board President Tony Clement announced the move Wednesday as the Conservative government’s latest step to improve transparency and fairness in government contracting.

Clement said retired public servants leave their jobs with valuable experience and corporate memory and they are still able to work in government. But he said their names, what work they will do, the contract’s value and whether the deal was sole-sourced or competitively won, must be disclosed on the hiring departments’ websites. The new rule comes into effect Jan. 1.

Departments now have to disclose on their websites all contracts over $10,000 but they provide no information on whether public servants won the contract. The information will also be flagged within the hiring department’s financial and contracting systems.

Along with disclosing the contract and their names, Clement said deputy ministers will have to provide ministers with updates on these contracts through quarterly reports. They will also have to give ministers a report at the beginning of every new year that projects the types of contracts that will go to pensioned public servants.

Contracts awarded by Treasury Board, the general manager of government, to former bureaucrats will have to be personally approved by Clement.

Some bureaucrats say the move is aimed at closing the revolving door of retired public servants coming back into government as high-priced consultants at the same time they are collecting pensions that can be worth up to 70 per cent of their previous salary.

It’s a complaint that is particularly directed at the Department of National Defence, where military personnel can come back on contract without a cooling-off period on the day after they leave the Canadian Forces.

“This is just good government,” Clement said. “I think we should be more accountable and transparent when a department is hiring people on government pensions … this will allow us to track it better and provide that kind of transparency to the public.”

Clement, however, acknowledged the new rule could make departments think twice about who they are hiring when they know it will be made public.

Public servants collecting pensions or those who left on buyouts have faced a slew of rules governing when they can come back and what they can do since the Liberals massive downsizing of the 1990s.

These rules won’t change. Public servants, for example, face a cooling-off period of a year before they can work for government. They also face pension penalties or restrictions on how much they can earn while collecting a pension during the first year after departing the public service,

The use of contractors has been a brewing issues for years as the bill climbed to $8 billion a year. Government officials say a recent report by the government’s procurement ombudsman, which criticized the Canada School of Public Service’s handling of a contract with a retired bureaucrat, brought the issue into the spotlight.

Some say the move is part of a broader strategy designed to limit the number of public servants collecting pensions coming back to work for the government. The government is already changing the post-employment and lobbying rules to limit retired the ability of retired public servants to lobby their former colleagues for contracts for third party clients.

But critics say the policy does little if it is aimed at deterring the use of retired public servants who can collect both pension and contract income. The existing loopholes that public servants can use to get around pension penalties remain unchanged, they say.

For instance, public servants can join a firm, consortium or temporary help agency that bids for federal work and they don’t have to disclose whether former public servants on pension are doing the work.

But Clement said the new rule was a first step and more changes in procurement rules are to come.

“All I can say we are always looking at ways to continuously improve and so I won’t say what is on or off the table but I wouldn’t say this is the last step,” he said.

Alan Williams, a former assistant deputy minister who oversaw procurement, questioned what problem the government is trying to fix with the new rules. He said they won’t improvement contracting or efficiencies and argued that a public servant who receives a contract or gives a contract shouldn’t be reticent about public disclosure.

If the policy is aimed at limiting the number of public servants who land contracts then it should have changed the contracting rules, he said..

“All I can say is, ‘So what?’ Disclosing who gets a contract makes perfect sense. No one should ever be embarrassed about hiring a public servant if it’s done under rules and if you can’t defend it, then you shouldn’t have done it.”

In his last report, Auditor-General Michael Ferguson said departments have to do a better job planning the $8 billion they spend a year on contractors. He said the biggest problem is that departments aren’t coordinating their staffing, contracting and business planning to determine whether it’s cheaper and more “cost effective” to some hire contractors or use public servants to do the work.